Small niche, proud sales
Fisch Meier Direkt positions Saab as a true niche brand through dialogue marketing
Fisch Meier Direkt positions Saab as an absolute niche brand with dialog marketingby luca aloisiOnly 7 percent of the Swiss population knows Saab. Although the Swedish car manufacturer has come to terms with this fact, it is now relying on a new communication tactic with the DM agency Fisch Meier Direkt. Clearly focused on the potential segment, dialog marketing becomes the most important weapon against the competition.
In view of the various award-winning campaigns that McCann-Erickson, Geneva, had designed for Saab Switzerland and the above-average sales rates for several years, the surprise in the advertising industry was well-founded when the Swedish car manufacturer decided last summer to withdraw its communications budget from the in-house agency of parent company General Motors (GM) without a pitch. As the Geneva-based agency also looks after GM's sister company Opel, it was assumed that McCann-Erickson was being cut out of the competition.
However, the decision to entrust communications to the Adliswil-based direct marketing agency Fisch Meier Direkt had other reasons and was not premeditated at General Motors, but at Saab headquarters back in 1998. At that time, the Swedes transferred the communications budget to the Stockholm agency Lowe Brindfors. After a period of awareness-raising and strategy development, the centralized marketing efforts in Switzerland were also replaced by a federalist model designed to better address local market situations.
The fact that the Adliswil-based DM specialists were part of the Lowe-Lintas network until recently was not a decisive factor in the evaluation, because otherwise Arno Gunsch, Marketing Manager at Saab, would now be facing another agency change. Publicis, which recently took over Fisch Meier Direkt, is now advertising for Renault.
Arno Gunsch, who moved from BMW to Saab almost a year ago, was aware of the challenge: building up the unsupported market awareness of 7 percent with the classic understanding of marketing communication solutions for mainstream premium brands is almost impossible in view of the modest advertising budget. Gunsch metaphorically: "Don Quixote's fight against windmills." Saab will continue to maintain the necessary publicity for a brand through basic communication in the mass media. However, a different budget allocation - especially in direct communication - should improve profitability.
High-speed advertising engine only ran at idle for a long time
A look back and across the border illustrates the dilemma: in Germany, Saab's advertising expenditure in 1998 amounted to 2775 Deutschmarks per car sold - almost four times as much as the average for all brands. It was completely absurd to continue to cultivate the market in this way. The advertising engine was running at full speed - but idling, because the effect was disproportionately low.
In Switzerland, where the communication budget amounted to around CHF 4 million last year, the brand paid around CHF 1,800 for each unit sold. This was not the only indication that the new tactic, which was also based on dialog marketing, was beginning to take effect.
Saab was also on the winning side of the Swiss car market in 2000: while total new registrations fell by 0.8 percent according to the Association of Swiss Automobile Importers (VSAI), sales of Saab cars rose by 2.5 percent. Even the recall of 1,300,000 95 models due to electronic defects did nothing to dampen the upturn in demand.
The contact begins with a latent interest in Saab
This favorable development almost makes us forget "that Saab lags far behind its direct competitors Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Volvo in terms of share of voice," says Gilbert Fisch, co-owner and managing director of Fisch Meier Direkt. That is why the company wants to make even more efficient use of the available resources: On the one hand, to tailor the campaigns to the specific customer segments and place them accordingly in order to support or build brand awareness and loyalty, and on the other hand, to trigger a good feeling in the stomach of potential customers through dialog marketing that starts early.
This emotional approach should be carefully ammunitioned with a well-dosed set of arguments that can withstand any criticism. From now on, the dialog with prospective customers will be conducted in the same way as with existing customers, is the motto. The first product to emerge from this new approach was the simple Welcome Package 2000, which cannot simply be torn open. The unusual direct mail requires the addressee to be more interested in the brand, because: You need a screwdriver to open the box.
Arno Gunsch is aiming high with his new communication policy: In the medium term, he wants to reach the 6000-unit mark. However, his handicap lies in the small model range of two lines that are visually very similar. Gunsch is self-critical: "It's clear that you can never generate the same sales with two lines as competitors who have seven or eight." However, this circumstance also works to the brand's advantage, as the given size offers a different marketing approach.
Saab intends to develop in a still
position a narrower niche
As the broadly effective advertising channels were not the only real transmission belt for Saab's message in the future, a change of style was made. "We have come to terms with the fact that we have reached certain limits in the area of perception in mass communication. We have moved away from this level in order to cultivate the awareness of a niche brand instead," says Gunsch. This means that we are not targeting the broad masses, but rather a limited group of interested people who are looked after from the very first contact. The marketing manager knows where these people are disproportionately represented and what psychological characteristics they have - progressive, inward-looking, higher education and income class, interested in culture. This is why he wants to use DemoScope's crosshairs to define this market more precisely than before.
Saab wants to differentiate itself more clearly from the competition as a niche brand. "Aspects that characterize Saab, such as the innovation that the brand embodies, the entire Scandinavian background, the simple, clear lines and the safety standard are topics that cannot be conveyed in any other way with generic marketing communication and in the tough environment with our budget," Marketing Manager Gunsch is convinced.
To make up for this deficit, Saab Switzerland was therefore looking for an agency that knew the core business of customer relationship management (CRM). Gunsch wants to expand this through customer and leads management in the focused segment. This means that as soon as someone is interested in the brand, they are to be intensified to a dialog period in order to build up the basis for decision-making. This does not expose the potential customer to a flood of information, assures Fisch, as the customer determines the further processing themselves.
Other communication for
Different levels of awareness
Since last summer, Fisch Meier Direkt has derived its advertising efforts from the restrictions in the target audience and media mix, ranging from the strategic brand management campaign - until recently designed and coordinated in Sweden - to model advertising, most of which is designed in Adliswil.
The fact that Fisch's team is even responsible for the brand-leading implementations is due to the fact that Saab has completely different basic requirements in Scandinavia, the USA and England: up to 70 percent brand awareness and up to 20 percent market share. There, the well-known "Versus" approach of classic advertising, in which there is a lot of style and very little car, also makes sense. In Switzerland, the top-of-mind position cannot be achieved.
"That's why we do a balancing act," says Gilbert Fisch. "Between strategic and tactical communication, we concentrate primarily on the latter." This is where he sees the better potential impact per franc invested. The four brand pillars of control, performance, safety and design will continue to be built upon. However, the aim is to move away from elitist, reserved communication and to encourage the 50 or so dealers to engage more consciously in dialog with potential customers. "Courteous, but not pushy", as Fisch puts it. This is far easier than having a dealer network of over 100 garages. This results in a quality of dialog that gives prospective Saab customers a good feeling.
The best prerequisite for bringing technical features such as the turbocharger closer. After all, such features can hardly be explained verbally, "this is a sensory element that we can present much better as a component in dialog," says Fisch and concludes all too truthfully: "A single bad salesperson can ruin even the best multimillion-dollar campaign."
In view of the various award-winning campaigns that McCann-Erickson, Geneva, had designed for Saab Switzerland and the above-average sales rates for several years, the surprise in the advertising industry was well-founded when the Swedish car manufacturer decided last summer to withdraw its communications budget from the in-house agency of parent company General Motors (GM) without a pitch. As the Geneva-based agency also looks after GM's sister company Opel, it was assumed that McCann-Erickson was being cut out of the competition.
However, the decision to entrust communications to the Adliswil-based direct marketing agency Fisch Meier Direkt had other reasons and was not premeditated at General Motors, but at Saab headquarters back in 1998. At that time, the Swedes transferred the communications budget to the Stockholm agency Lowe Brindfors. After a period of awareness-raising and strategy development, the centralized marketing efforts in Switzerland were also replaced by a federalist model designed to better address local market situations.
The fact that the Adliswil-based DM specialists were part of the Lowe-Lintas network until recently was not a decisive factor in the evaluation, because otherwise Arno Gunsch, Marketing Manager at Saab, would now be facing another agency change. Publicis, which recently took over Fisch Meier Direkt, is now advertising for Renault.
Arno Gunsch, who moved from BMW to Saab almost a year ago, was aware of the challenge: building up the unsupported market awareness of 7 percent with the classic understanding of marketing communication solutions for mainstream premium brands is almost impossible in view of the modest advertising budget. Gunsch metaphorically: "Don Quixote's fight against windmills." Saab will continue to maintain the necessary publicity for a brand through basic communication in the mass media. However, a different budget allocation - especially in direct communication - should improve profitability.
High-speed advertising engine only ran at idle for a long time
A look back and across the border illustrates the dilemma: in Germany, Saab's advertising expenditure in 1998 amounted to 2775 Deutschmarks per car sold - almost four times as much as the average for all brands. It was completely absurd to continue to cultivate the market in this way. The advertising engine was running at full speed - but idling, because the effect was disproportionately low.
In Switzerland, where the communication budget amounted to around CHF 4 million last year, the brand paid around CHF 1,800 for each unit sold. This was not the only indication that the new tactic, which was also based on dialog marketing, was beginning to take effect.
Saab was also on the winning side of the Swiss car market in 2000: while total new registrations fell by 0.8 percent according to the Association of Swiss Automobile Importers (VSAI), sales of Saab cars rose by 2.5 percent. Even the recall of 1,300,000 95 models due to electronic defects did nothing to dampen the upturn in demand.
The contact begins with a latent interest in Saab
This favorable development almost makes us forget "that Saab lags far behind its direct competitors Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Volvo in terms of share of voice," says Gilbert Fisch, co-owner and managing director of Fisch Meier Direkt. That is why the company wants to make even more efficient use of the available resources: On the one hand, to tailor the campaigns to the specific customer segments and place them accordingly in order to support or build brand awareness and loyalty, and on the other hand, to trigger a good feeling in the stomach of potential customers through dialog marketing that starts early.
This emotional approach should be carefully ammunitioned with a well-dosed set of arguments that can withstand any criticism. From now on, the dialog with prospective customers will be conducted in the same way as with existing customers, is the motto. The first product to emerge from this new approach was the simple Welcome Package 2000, which cannot simply be torn open. The unusual direct mail requires the addressee to be more interested in the brand, because: You need a screwdriver to open the box.
Arno Gunsch is aiming high with his new communication policy: In the medium term, he wants to reach the 6000-unit mark. However, his handicap lies in the small model range of two lines that are visually very similar. Gunsch is self-critical: "It's clear that you can never generate the same sales with two lines as competitors who have seven or eight." However, this circumstance also works to the brand's advantage, as the given size offers a different marketing approach.
Saab intends to develop in a still
position a narrower niche
As the broadly effective advertising channels were not the only real transmission belt for Saab's message in the future, a change of style was made. "We have come to terms with the fact that we have reached certain limits in the area of perception in mass communication. We have moved away from this level in order to cultivate the awareness of a niche brand instead," says Gunsch. This means that we are not targeting the broad masses, but rather a limited group of interested people who are looked after from the very first contact. The marketing manager knows where these people are disproportionately represented and what psychological characteristics they have - progressive, inward-looking, higher education and income class, interested in culture. This is why he wants to use DemoScope's crosshairs to define this market more precisely than before.
Saab wants to differentiate itself more clearly from the competition as a niche brand. "Aspects that characterize Saab, such as the innovation that the brand embodies, the entire Scandinavian background, the simple, clear lines and the safety standard are topics that cannot be conveyed in any other way with generic marketing communication and in the tough environment with our budget," Marketing Manager Gunsch is convinced.
To make up for this deficit, Saab Switzerland was therefore looking for an agency that knew the core business of customer relationship management (CRM). Gunsch wants to expand this through customer and leads management in the focused segment. This means that as soon as someone is interested in the brand, they are to be intensified to a dialog period in order to build up the basis for decision-making. This does not expose the potential customer to a flood of information, assures Fisch, as the customer determines the further processing themselves.
Other communication for
Different levels of awareness
Since last summer, Fisch Meier Direkt has derived its advertising efforts from the restrictions in the target audience and media mix, ranging from the strategic brand management campaign - until recently designed and coordinated in Sweden - to model advertising, most of which is designed in Adliswil.
The fact that Fisch's team is even responsible for the brand-leading implementations is due to the fact that Saab has completely different basic requirements in Scandinavia, the USA and England: up to 70 percent brand awareness and up to 20 percent market share. There, the well-known "Versus" approach of classic advertising, in which there is a lot of style and very little car, also makes sense. In Switzerland, the top-of-mind position cannot be achieved.
"That's why we do a balancing act," says Gilbert Fisch. "Between strategic and tactical communication, we concentrate primarily on the latter." This is where he sees the better potential impact per franc invested. The four brand pillars of control, performance, safety and design will continue to be built upon. However, the aim is to move away from elitist, reserved communication and to encourage the 50 or so dealers to engage more consciously in dialog with potential customers. "Courteous, but not pushy", as Fisch puts it. This is far easier than having a dealer network of over 100 garages. This results in a quality of dialog that gives prospective Saab customers a good feeling.
The best prerequisite for bringing technical features such as the turbocharger closer. After all, such features can hardly be explained verbally, "this is a sensory element that we can present much better as a component in dialog," says Fisch and concludes all too truthfully: "A single bad salesperson can ruin even the best multimillion-dollar campaign."
